The story of two not-so-new-anymore dog owners and an extremely cute (new to the city of Toronto) beagle named Duke.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Behavior Adjustment Training (BAT) for Leash-Aggressive Dog

I was recently introduced to Behavior Adjustment Training (BAT) for treating fear/aggression (as well as its sister technique, CAT, or Constructional Aggression Treatment).

Having gotten Duke to a certain level using food and classical counter conditioning/desensitization, I am interested in new techniques that could be faster. Maybe BAT is faster than classical counter conditioning and desensitization. Who knows. I'm going to give it a try with Duke and see how he likes it.

5 comments:

One of my specialties is working with aggression, leash and possessive issues and what I've noticed is people are quick to leave counterconditioning methods using treats or toys before they have a full understanding on what the dog's true trigger or insecurity is and being able to read and relax their body language to ensure a polite meet n greet.

ie..With my last foster Jake, we learned that it wasn't the dog that created the anxiety, it was the face to face meet n greet, so we worked on Jake meeting dogs coming up behind them, then sitting and doing tricks beside them, then once his body language relaxed, they both met. That's all it took.

Patricial McConnell's book "For the Love of a dog" & Leslie Mcdevitt's book Control Unleashed give you insight to internal workings of dogs with anxiety that get the best of them.

I forgot to add reading up on neurscience is also sooo helpful for both ends of the leash. Fav's right now are John Ratey's "A user's guide to the brain" and Antonio Damasio's "Looking for Spinoza"

I think adding to your training tickle trunk is so beneficial to the countless dogs that you will help in your lifetime. I just found that understanding the inner workings complimented the numerous methods out there available to learn. Understanding how to not only recognize and dissolve emotional distress, and identify the root of the triggers before working on technique for me speeds up the learning process for the dog and human light years.

So, I haven't tried BAT yet. For two reasons. One its freezing here, so its actually hard to find bait dogs around on our walks. Second, the same people that put me onto BAT gave me some new ideas around vanilla counter conditioning with food that I'm going to go back to it.

When the weather warms up I will be able to try BAT, since the local dog run (where I can work outside of the fence) will be full of bait dogs again.

A followup to this. I have not done formal setups for BAT but I did it once on the street when the opportunity presented itself. A dog was tied up to a bike post outside a cafe. I let Duke see the dog at approximately 25 feet. He looked, looked, whined, looked. When he was "ready", I cued "let's go" and he happily u-turned and left with me. The concept that the dog is gathering information about the threat and is not ready to leave yet is quite compelling.